119 quotes
“You damned liberals.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means you’re too soft-hearted to ever actually do anything.”
Red Mars (1992)
Beauty was the promise of happiness, not happiness itself; and the anticipated world was often more rich than anything real.
Red Mars (1992)
We must not throw the baby socialism out with the Stalinist bathwater, or we lose many concepts of obvious fairness that we need.
Green Mars (1993)
We’ve moved beyond our ability to understand our technology.
Blue Mars (1996)
The urge to excel and the urge to lead aren’t the same. Sometimes I think they may be opposites.
Red Mars (1992)
A change in the form of government, why should that make a difference in the way he lived?
Blue Mars (1996)
If enough data points trouble the theory, the theory may be wrong. If the theory is basic, the paradigm may have to change.
Green Mars (1993)
No step along the way had seemed more than a little thing; but altogether it came to something rather monstrous.
Green Mars (1993)
It’s a sorry excuse for a government anyway. It always gets back to the same old thing, power suckers sucking power.
Blue Mars (1996)
One of the chief features of incompetence was an inability to see it in oneself.
Galileo's Dream (2009)
No—living on after the memory died was mere farce, pointless and awful.
Blue Mars (1996)
But one had to trust instruments over instincts, that was science.
Blue Mars (1996)
Science is--or should be--the greenest force of all.
After every revolution there is an interregnum, in which communities run themselves and all is well, and then the new regime comes in and screws things up.
Blue Mars (1996)
One could not overshoot a planet’s carrying capacity without disaster following—that was what Earth’s history since the nineteenth century existed to prove.
Blue Mars (1996)
You must be very scrupulous not to gather power in to the center just because you can do it. Power corrupts, that’s the basic law of politics. Maybe the only law.
Blue Mars (1996)
“We could have a contest. Who does Jackie listen to least?”
Maya laughed out loud. “Everyone would win.”
Green Mars (1993)
There are many facets of science that are almost exactly opposite of dramatic narrative. It's slow, tedious, inconclusive, it's hard to tell good guys from bad guys — it's everything that a normal hour of Star Trek is not.
Nakedness was dangerous to the social order, she thought, because it revealed too much reality.
Green Mars (1993)
Michael was so stubbornly optimistic that it made him stupid sometimes, or at least painful to be around.
Green Mars (1993)